Developer tooling and containerization company Docker has a new CEO: Former Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) executive vice president Don Johnson (pictured above) landed in the hotseat starting Wednesday. Incumbent Scott Johnston will leave the company with immediate effect.

During his eight-year spell at Oracle, Johnson was instrumental in transitioning the company from its legacy on-premise roots to the cloud, setting up the OCI unit, and spearheading the company’s resurgence these past few years.

Prior to Oracle, Johnson worked as an engineer at AWS since the inception of Amazon’s cloud division.

Docker is seeking such credentials as it looks to expand into areas across the whole “development life cycle,” including cloud-based services.

“Docker both feels like a cool new startup and the bedrock of the container native universe, prevalent now and moving towards ubiquitous, as cloud-native takes over the world,” Johnson said in a statement announcing his appointment.

Johnson is Docker’s sixth CEO, following co-founder Solomon Hykes who led the company until 2013; Ben Golub, who departed in 2017 to make way for Steve Singh; and Rob Bearden, who was the company’s CEO for just six months before Docker chief product officer, Scott Johnston, was promoted to lead the company in 2019.

Last valued at $2.1 billion at its Series C round three years ago, Palo Alto-based Docker divested its enterprise business to Mirantis when Johnston took the reins six years ago. That deal signaled a shift in strategic focus as competing containerization services — such as Google-led Kubernetes and RedHat’s OpenShift — gained traction.

Subsequently, Docker “returned to its roots,” targeting developer tooling and container workflows rather than competing in enterprise infrastructure. This included new services spanning debugging, supply chain security, container testing and, a cloud-based container build service it launched last year.

Containerization involves packaging software and its dependencies into portable, isolated environments (called “containers”), ensuring that the software runs consistently across all systems — on a local machine, server, or whatever cloud environment a company wishes to deploy on.

So as AI and cloud converge, with Docker pushing its own AI tools into the mix, Docker sees a new opportunity ahead.

“There is so much opportunity to solve the broad array of challenges that developers and businesses continue to struggle with — from building and running the latest AI models, to running and operating in a secure and scalable manner, to achieving advanced levels of compliance, to just not breaking the build in CI [continuous integration,” Johnson said. “Everything is harder than it should be. Every challenge that developers face is an opportunity for us to step in, take on the burden, and make their lives easier. You’re going to see Docker solve these problems and more, building and innovating, and shipping things fast.”